“Your
parents allow you use your left hand? They did not flog you? No child of mine
will try that o. I go beat am comot for em
body. ”
“Wait
O! Na that hand you go take cook for your husband?”
“If
I marry u eeeh, I will break that hand and tie it to your back”
“Are
any of your parents left-handed? No? Then who come take am from?”
“Them
still they talk say you be Lawyer, u come they use left hand on top. This girl
u sure say u wan marry?”
It is 2016 and when some people find out I am left handed, they look
at me as if I am a creature from outer space or a hydra headed monster they
have not come across before. There are those who like it and want me to teach
them how to use theirs, there are those who admire it, there are those who want
to marry me because of it. These people as few as they are, are not the
problem.
The problem is that man, that woman, who
I think is enlightened and exposed and supposed to know better. It is that
elderly man who sits next to me at a Restaurant and scolds me to use my right
hand to eat my own food. It is that taxi driver who will refuse to collect his
fare from my left hand even though it is physically impossible to reach him
with my right. It is that woman who tells me I will not marry a “good” husband
because all the eligible guys do not want wives who will cook their food with
her left hand. It is that young man who threatens to break the left hand of the
girl he is dating. It is that young girl who walks in on her friend cooking and
makes a nasty comment about how the food may not taste good because of the hand
being used to prepare it. The BIG problem is people treating left-handed people as second class citizens just because that is what he or she has seen others do.
Left-handed people are bullied, abused, threatened, and made fun of the
world over because of this, There are no safe zones. It is the same
treatment from Church to Mosque, School to Playground to wherever we go. The
home is the headquarters of everything; From when we are babies and try to suck
our left thumbs to when we begin to do homework and chores, we are put down,
smacked, starved and scolded by our family members; It never stops. Even now in
my 20's some of my Aunts and Uncles still make snide comments when they come to
visit; My mum still talks when I try to open canned tomatoes in the kitchen ( i
do it counter-clockwise and the knife or tin cutter comes towards my hands and
not away like it does for “right-handers”).
It took me leaving home and moving away from the constant criticism
to build my self esteem to the level it is today. Being picked on from babyhood
and been told there is something wrong and abnormal with you leaves scars no matter how thick
skinned you think you are. In my case it was na so her Mama people dey do and
not who you take am resemble? It all
boils down to the same thing – using the left hand was bad, was wrong , was
rude, was disrespectful, was not supposed to be used by a woman and was not our
culture. Ask any of these people what is bad, rude, disrespectful about using
the left hand and they do not have any answer. They continue with the chant –
it is not our culture.
Some people have a worse time with their own struggle. A friend of mine while growing up is Ambilevous today because he was not allowed to use his
left hand; Both hands are not well developed. His handwriting on any of his hands
can best be described as “fowl-scratch”. His case can even be said to be not so
serious because he is a man. Growing up left-handed as a girl in Nigeria is not
easy. It is more difficult than being a Nigerian Coach for the Super Eagles
when everyone is clamoring for a Foreign Coach.
As a child growing up and being introduced to the Internet, one of
my first search terms was ”left-handed
people”. The things I read blew me away, I learnt that the Arabic word for left-hand A’asar translates as loser. In
German, it is linkisch and it means awkward. Canhoto
in Portugese means incapable.
In Japan, being left-handed was a ground for
divorce up to the 20th Century. I also found
out that left-handers are more likely to be geniuses (Marie Currie, Aristotle, Albert
Einstein, Da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Michangelo). We are more creative (4 of the
5 original designers of the MAC computer are left-handed), we have higher IQs
than our right-handed counterparts, We excel at multi-tasking (I can laugh at
the joke in the book I am reading and still tell you your last statement
verbatim). I realized that this discrimination is practiced all over the world
and not just in Nigeria,It made the criticism easier to accept.
Now when people comment negatively on my use of left hand, I picture
myself in a circle with Prof Charles Soludo, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Oprah
Winfrey, Whoopie Goldberg, Barack Obama,
Marie Curie, Joan of Arc, Julius Ceaser, Steve McQueen, Tony Blair, Queen
Elizabeth and many other great people and I smile. I have a Superpower you
cannot take it away from me. I AM LEFT-HANDED
